Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  So each in his own way snouted joyfully up at the sky, where for a time that morning streaks of blue ran beyond the driving clouds, and they peered this way and that as if, very, very soon now, they sensed they would see the world anew.

  It was only after this pleasant and promising interlude was over that Tryfan began to take in the scene about him, and see how fine and splendid it was. The more so that good Spindle, quite overcome, it seemed, to be in a favourite place of his with moles he trusted, was humming to himself a wormful song and seemed for the time being to have quite forgotten the object of their journey.

  Tryfan saw that they were halfway up the slope of a southward-dipping vale whose lines were gentle curves, subtle and aged. Near and far rose Stones, not in any obvious order of circle or line, but spread out across the vale, here and there, like friends that have paused awhile on a common journey to contemplate a springtime view. The Stones, big and small, many fallen and a few erect, stretched away as far as the eye could see.

  The colours were, for now, March-dull: the bare earth brown or shining grey where wet chalk stained it. The grassy places were still dominated by the dried-out stalks of the previous autumn, while the distant copses of trees, still leafless, were dark and rather ominous. But below them, where a stream ran, was a line of greener grass, but that was all. No sound, no life but for the wheeling of rooks darkly on the grey horizon, and the grey-white flutter of black-headed seagull over a distant field. And....

  “What is it, Tryfan?” asked Spindle, using Tryfan’s name for the first time, and coming close, as one who trusts another will.

  Tryfan’s head was tilted a little on one side as if trying to hear again something he thought he might have heard before.

  “I thought it was the call of lapwing,” he said quietly. “The last time I heard that was a full cycle of seasons ago over the Pastures alongside Duncton Wood! Now that’s a sound that heralds spring!”

  “It does!” said Spindle. “That and the lark which rises over the chalk and drives a mole mad if he’s not got his paws on the ground and in a good mood!” The two moles laughed, shared laughter, and Boswell, behind them, was glad to see them together, and to feel in his old bones the energy they had, and the promise they felt. And he whispered an invocation for them that they might find courage and true purpose in the days and months to come, and trust each other.

  Tryfan and Spindle, flank to flank, did not notice him at all, but instead looked excitedly about them, for spring was imminent in the air, still just beyond reach, but there, near, coming: and this bitter wind would stop.

  The two wandered, chatting a little, out over the surface, leaving Boswell in the protection of the tunnel entrance while Spindle pointed out the features of the place. There were a few taller standing Stones among the many there, but most were small, like a scatter of scree or debris across the lovely curving vales and hills, running east and west, north and south, fields on fields of sarsen stones. Most strange, most wonderful. In places there were shallow pits in which tiny stones seemed to have collected and no grass grew. In other places the sarsen stones peeped out of the soil, like the tip or flank of giant buried Stones. While here and there, near and far, rose the Stones themselves, guardians of those slopes and vales. It made a mole want to wander forever among them, and wander awhile they did, passing among the fallen smaller stones, and staring up in reverence at one of the bigger ones still standing.

  “Oh! There you are, Boswell!” Tryfan said more than once, for Boswell, having been left behind, seemed to have caught them up again and even been waiting ahead of them. More than once that happened! Boswell watching over them, content.

  “What a strange place this is,” said Tryfan, “a mole loses all sense of direction. I could have sworn you were behind us Boswell...” But Boswell was gone, and only Spindle was there, oblivious it seemed of these confusions. Or used to them, more like. But eventually, one way or another, they all joined up together again and took a stance out of the wind. The early promise of the morning had died a little, the distant streaks of blue sky had gone, the north wind was freshening again. Spring was going to bide its time a little more.

  “What is this place called?” asked Tryfan.

  “I don’t think it has a name. When I was barely more than a pup I came to this place alone, and rarely saw another mole,” said Spindle quietly. “I would explore the ways among the Stones and sometimes go into the tunnels that moles of Seven Barrows delved long ago but no longer use. They are wormless now, and ruined, but they still give a mole shelter from rain or curious kestrel.”

  “How many Stones are there here?” asked Tryfan.

  Nomole knows or will ever know,” said Spindle. “Not for want of trying to find out though! I’ve started counting them many times but a mole grows tired... too many here! Too many to count!”

  “But the standing Stones,” said Tryfan. “Surely those you could count.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Spindle, “and I can tell you how many there aren’t. Not less than six no more than seven!”

  “‘Not less than six nor more than seven?’” repeated Tryfan, his face puzzled. “You mean there’s either six or seven?”

  “Yes I do mean that,” said Spindle.

  “Well, which is it?” said Tryfan.

  “Come and see for yourself,” said Spindle with the weary patience of a mole familiar with a problem which he knows another is going to find impossible to solve.

  He led them underground, through tunnels ruined indeed, for many of the chambers were open to the skies, or had fallen in and a mole had to climb out on to the surface for a time before picking up the tunnel’s line again. They soon came to the buried flanks of one of the standing Stones, the one Tryfan presumed they had already passed, judging from the direction in which they approached it. Then another – the green rust-yellow side of the sarsen stone familiar to Tryfan from the Duncton Stone. And a third, its sides rising high above them before the roof closed in, and the tunnel curving away around its edge so that a mole going round it, as they did, could not quite work out its subterranean dimensions or shape.

  “How many so far?” asked Spindle.

  “Why, three of course,” said Tryfan.

  “Perhaps,” said Spindle strangely.

  So they progressed through more tunnels, the next two Stones being further afield and the route they took confusing, for they crossed and recrossed themselves more than once.

  “Must be a better way of visiting each of them underground than this,” grumbled Tryfan.

  “Must there?” said Spindle.

  Each of the bases of the Stones was quite distinct, in colour or shape, and each had a tunnel that went right round them and then onwards, though never straight on but, rather, at a swinging angle that made it hard for a mole to judge quite where he was relative to the others.

  Finally they had visited the base of seven Stones and touched each one, feeling its humming height rise above them up through the soil and on towards the sky, sentinels to the faith of moles, emblems and harbingers of Silence. Spindle brought them back out on to the surface.

  “So,” said Tryfan as they took a route to the surface, “seven in all. Why not say so immediately? No point in making a mystery where there is none!”

  “Yes, I quite agree,” said Spindle, “except that... er... well. See for yourself!”

  They had surfaced through some gravelly soil and now found themselves some way to the west of where they had first gone underground, with the standing Stones at varying distances all around them.

  “There you are,” said Tryfan easily, “one, two, three...” But his voice began to falter. “Four, five, six...” he concluded, turning around again and staring at each of the Stones in succession. “Well I’ve made a mistake that’s all. There were seven, weren’t there?”

  “Underground there were,” said Spindle. “But, here, on the surface, one’s gone missing.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Tryfa
n impatiently. “Look. One, two, three...” but however many times he counted them, and from whichever direction he started, and even when he went here and there checking what he saw and even (finally) when he went underground once more to count them subterraneously again, he could not find the seventh Stone on the surface, nor work out which of the seven underground ones was “missing’.

  When he was tired, confused and ill-tempered and had rejoined the other two (who had long since crouched quietly to munch worms), Boswell looked uneasily about them, and spoke almost for the first time that morning.

  “Perhaps now is the time for you to tell us what more you know, Spindle,” he said.

  The wind about them stirred and seemed troubled and urgent, the day more cloudy above, the air sharper once more, and there were slight spits of rain in the air. Then Spindle began to tell them.

  It was in the middle of the attack by the grikes on the Holy Burrows when, in spite of every effort he and his master Brevis could make, the two of them became separated. Faced by an onrush of grikes, Spindle had turned down a tunnel and run, and found that Brevis was no longer with him.

  But in what Brevis must have realised might be a final separation, the scribemole had thrust something into Spindle’s paws. He only looked at it a little time later when, finding himself in some nomole’s land of quiet in the assault on Uffington, he found he was carrying the report Brevis had been scribing. It seemed to him then that nothing could be more important than that he did not allow it to fall into grike paws, and so, harried and chased and in danger of his life, there seem to have been born in Spindle, but a humble cleric, the conviction that he must save what texts he could from the Library itself, and not just the one he found himself carrying. Knowing the tunnels as he did, he was able to make a cautious way towards the Library through tunnels filled with mayhem and slaughter. Somehow, miraculously as it seemed to him, he reached it, and found it so far intact. There were a couple of elderly scholars posted at the portal protecting it and when they saw him they allowed him in. Shortly afterwards grikes approached and the scribemoles ordered him to retreat into the deeper recesses of the Library. It was then he heard dark sound for the first time, for the guardians of the Library must have used their talons on the defensive scribing by the portal which was later to confuse Tryfan for a time.

  But the ruse worked only for a short time and the grikes charged in, and Spindle saw, from where he was hidden, the killing of the two moles and the terrible destruction of the Library as more grikes came in and began to pull down the Rolls and break the ancient bark books of Uffington.

  Spindle knew that he would soon be found, and had no doubt that he would be killed. Yet even then, driven by an impulse he did not understand, he sought to hide the text Brevis had entrusted him with by burying it in a dusty shadowed corner of the Library.

  The grikes did not seem to suspect that other moles might be in the Library and so did not set about searching its nooks and corners, or its darker recesses, preferring instead to systematically work their way along its shelves, embayment by embayment, destroying all they saw.

  So Spindle was able to work undisturbed as he burrowed deep and put first Brevis’s text and then other ancient texts into the hole he made. In this way he had managed to hide nine or ten of the most ancient-looking books he could find before the grikes, perhaps hearing his movements, became suspicious and began searching for him.

  He might then have been found, but their attention was diverted by the arrival of a few scribemoles making a belated and futile attempt to save the treasures that their forebears had protected for so long. During this brief diversion Spindle was able to bring down a wall adjacent to a stack of books and bury them as well, if not completely at least enough to make it look as if they were not worth digging out again merely to destroy them.

  So, bravely, unable to escape, Spindle did what he could to save the books of the Holy Burrows knowing all the time that the outcome of his actions would probably be his own death.

  Soon the grikes put down the scribemole counterattack and turned back to finding him and now, mortally afraid, poor Spindle retreated into ever-more obscure corners of that great Library, clambering among the shelves, scurrying between walls, desperate, in what he believed to be his final moments, to put off death a few moments more.

  But to no avail. A shadow loomed behind him, he turned to face it, and two grikes were bearing down upon him, their shouts murderous and frightening. It was in that moment, as their talons raised upon high, ready to come down on the shadowy movement which was all they could see of him – for that part of the Library was dark indeed – that Spindle felt a paw at his flank, and heard a voice. A gentle paw, a gentle voice, yet strong, very sure, more certain and safe than anything he had ever known, such that he felt what he afterwards could only describe as the sense of coming back to his home burrow, where no harm could befall him.

  That voice said, “Spindle of Seven Barrows there is something more for you to save than these old texts. Now come, come with me...” and he turned and he saw a mole about whom such light shone that he was dazzled at its brightness, and felt that he was nothing before it. Behind him, as if at a great distance, he heard the grikes confused and in disarray, shouting that they had seen a mole but lost him and making recriminations against each other.

  Then he saw the face of the mole who had touched him, the eyes shining with love of mole. They were the eyes of a female who seemed young, barely more than a pup, and yet in her presence he felt safe and unafraid.

  She took him, as it seemed, even further into the corner into which he had retreated, and from there to a chamber in which lay, in no particular order, six books. And on each was placed a stone, small and seemingly inconsequential. And in that chamber was a light and a sound more beautiful than any he had ever seen or heard, and that young female was everywhere it seemed.

  “You will take the Books, Spindle, and you will hide them where they will be safe, with all the others that you find and collect. You will hide them so that future generations may find them, which they will. These stones you will take as well, but throw them amongst the pits by Seven Barrows, where all moles may see them but only moles who are ready will know what they see. There they will be safe until the time is right that they be taken up at last.”

  “But what books are they? And what stones?” he managed to ask.

  And she laughed, a laugh of such pleasure and joy that Spindle, even when he became very old, never forgot it, and ever desired to hear it again.

  “It is better that you know not their names, or what they mean. Your task is hard enough without that, good Spindle.”

  “How will I know where to take them?” he asked.

  “You’ll know, you’ll know...” she said, laughing again.

  “Well,” he declared, seeming to recover himself a little so that his normal curiosity got the better of him, “if those stones are what I think they are then there should one day be seven of them, for aren’t they the Stillstones the scribemoles have always guarded?”

  “Perhaps they are!” said the young mole playfully.

  “And those the Books for each one?” he added.

  “More than likely,” she said.

  He peered more closely at them, and she did not stop him, and then he ran his clerical paw – trembling no doubt – over them but the script was medieval and beyond his kenning.

  “When shall I start to remove them?” he asked.

  “Whenever you like, provided you can avoid the moles of darkness on your way.”

  “Well if they are the Books and Stillstones I think they are then there’s one I’d prefer to carry first, and that’s the Book of Fighting! It’ll protect me, won’t it?”

  “In a way it will. But your faith in the Stone will protect you more. Good luck, Spindle, worthy mole! Good luck!”

  “But – but you – will you come back?” he had asked finally, fearing her departure.

  “Oh yes,” he remembered h
er saying, “yes, for you I shall...” and she was gone, and her light and beauty with her, and he found himself crouched in the Library, and a grike ordering him up.

  “Little bastard,” said the grike, in the charming language that they used, “come with me now...” and he was dragged out of the Library and before another grike who had at his side a broken, pathetic, tortured scribe-mole Spindle knew. And this creature simply shook his head and whispered, “He’s Spindle, he’s a cleric, he’s not... he knows nothing, nothing...” And so Spindle’s life was saved.

  Yet there was more to that moment than that. For as the scribemole said, “He knows nothing...” he raised his agonised gaze to look in Spindle’s eyes and even as Spindle knew that he did know something, something important indeed, something that was the most important thing there was to know in the Holy Burrows, he knew that the broken scribemole saw it too, and was glad that his suffering was not in vain, and the Stone’s will might yet be done.

  After that Spindle remembered little, but that he was harshly interrogated and eventually, along with others, taken south-westwards from Uffington at the beginning of a trek to Avebury. It was then he escaped, made his way to the Seven Barrows, and wandered about for days, perhaps weeks, among the Stones that had given him sanctuary when he was a young mole. But whatever else he might have forgotten he did not forget the young mole who had found him in the Library, and revealed the Books and the Stillstones, nor the task she had given him.

  So it was that Spindle of Seven Barrows, a mole who was “not much of one for fighting or defence”, began his great task of carrying, without help or encouragement from anymole, in an isolation impossible to imagine, among burrows haunted by memory and death, those books he could salvage from moledom’s greatest Library, and most onerously of all, six of the seven great Books, and all but the last of the Stillstones whose secret place he had been shown.